pster wrote:What are the neuter endings? And why are they not specified in LSJ?

My apologies. It's a noun of the third declension that can be either masculine or feminine.It doesn't mean picked, chosen as an adjective but as substantive.

OK, that's what I thought. But I don't understand why--just complaining now--they would use English words that are rarely nouns to give the translations. I guess they just figured that the endings specified that it is a noun. But I think it would read better if they wrote someone or something picked...

No, it just seems that some nouns in Greek are rendered into adjectives in English.I remember we once had a discussion about this in class. Maybe it's the formation thatdictates whether a word would be considered an adjective or a noun.

Here, νη- is a poetic prefix with a negative force (Smyth §885. 5), and ἱδ- is the rootand we form a compοund word of the third declension (dental stem δ) in ι with nominative in -ις. That has to be a noun. As far as I could find, there is no such adjective declension.νήποινος for example is formed differently, from the fem. noun ποινή, νη-ποιν-, and sinceit's a compound adj., it has the same ending for masc. and fem., -ος, and -ον for the neut.

If you look at the examples for λογάς, it is noteworthy that often you get λογάς with another noun. Usually in nom. pl. So it really does seem to be functioning as an adjective. Hard to read the examples as cases of opposition. My quite unsophisticated guess is that the uses and hence the part of speech of the word hadn't been fully settled. I wonder how many examples of it we have?

Here is another example that is annoying me. OK, here you get a noun. But I don't understand the "of" in the definition? So here they are seemingly making explicit the adjectival! In the previous cases one could argue that they used the adjectival English because it was most convenient for giving the meaning of the Greek noun. But now, that argument is unavailable because they are translating it with an English noun. But why the "of"? Is that to indicate that the PRev.Laws passage is about partners? Perhaps so, but I had never noticed that before.

Well, usually it isn't the first definition. Usually it is when they are giving some particular sense. E.g., c. dat. of.... But that particular sense is piggybacking on the first bona fide definition. It just strikes me as very inconsistent. They don't do it all the time. But I am not sure what they are trying to convey that "partners in a tax-farming enterprise" doesn't convey. The best that I can come up with is that they are just trying to hedge a bit because while tax farmers may be the central case, it isn't, or they aren't sure whether it isn't, the only case. I just think it is out of place in a dictionary. Basically, I would claim they have failed to give any meaning at all. A meaning should give you something equivalent. But saying that something is said of something doesn't give you something equivalent. How could it? Saying that something is said of something is giving a sentence and sentences are not equivalent to the meanings of words, nor to words themselves, nor to the signs for the words, nor to those things to which the words refer (take your pick). Ultimately, at the heart of it is what is called a use/mention error. Meaning is at the level of use. "Of" phrases tell us how the words are mentioned. κοινών isn't said of the partners in the enterprise, "κοινών" is. For the logically minded, it is actually a species of pre-logical error. So actually, my view now is that LSJ are being insufficiently Oxbridge. I would expect greater fastidiousness from lexicographers.

pster wrote:So actually, my view now is that LSJ are being insufficiently Oxbridge. I would expect greater fastidiousness from lexicographers.

pster, I can't pretend to know what had dictated their style when they wrote this massive lexicon.Also, I'm not a native speaker, so I can't really tell what is awkward and artificial to the modern ear.

I can, however, link to a different lexicon where the word κοινωνός is defined underCommercial as c. partner, without the limitation of of, relating to, or the like.